Complaints about managing agents
This content applies to England only.
Housing laws vary between England and Scotland. Get advice relating to Scotland
If you own your home on a long lease, your freeholder may employ a managing agent to look after the leases on her/his behalf. The freeholder may be a company or person linked with the managing agent, or may be completely separate.
Who to contact
If you have a managing agent, you can complain to:
- the freeholder
- the managing agent
- the managing agent’s professional association.
If your lease is managed by a housing association, please see the section on complaints about housing associations.
Complaining to the freeholder
If you own a flat, the usual arrangement is that you have a long lease of your flat, and another person or company owns the freehold of the whole building. But arrangements are sometimes more complicated. For example there may be one or more ‘intervening’ leaseholders between you and the true freeholder. In this case, the landlord in your lease is really a leaseholder, but for the purposes of this section, the ‘freeholder’ is the person or company responsible for structural repairs and collecting service charges.
You can complain to the freeholder about poor behaviour by the managing agent. Your freeholder’s name and address should be in your annual service charge demand or in other correspondence or documents. If you do not have your freeholder’s name and address, ask the agent. The agent must give this information if you ask. Also, if your freeholder is a company, you can make the agent tell you the name and address of all the directors and the secretary.
A recognised residents’ association can make the freeholder consult it about the appointment or re-appointment of a managing agent. The freeholder does not have to do what the association says, but must take its views into account.
If at the end of the complaints procedure, you are not happy with the result or if the freeholder has failed to reply to your complaint letter, you may be able to use alternative dispute resolution (ADR) or go to court. But bear in mind that going to court can be very costly.
If a number of flat owners are dissatisfied
with the management of their flats, they can form a Right To Manage (RTM)
company and take over the management themselves. If you want to do this, contact the Leasehold Advisory Service (LEASE) for advice.
Complaining to the managing agent
What you should do depends
on whether the agent is a member of a professional association or scheme.
A member of a professional
association or scheme must have a complaints procedure. Get information from the
agent’s website or ask at the agent’s office. They must tell you about it if
you ask. If they do not have a complaints procedure or will not tell you about
it, contact the professional association or scheme and they will make sure that
your complaint is properly dealt with by their member.
An agent that is not a
member of a professional organisation or scheme may have a complaints procedure.
If so, use it. Ask about the complaints procedure at the agent’s office, or get
information from the agent’s website.
If the agent does not seem
to have a complaints procedure, or if you cannot get any information about it,
complain by letter. The agent may investigate, ask questions, ask you to send
copies of documents, and/or inspect your property. Then the agent should write
to you to tell you the result.
If at the end of the
complaints procedure, you are not happy with the result or if the agent has not
replied to your complaint, you can complain to the agent’s professional
association or scheme (see below), use alternative dispute
resolution (ADR) or go
to court.
Complaining to a professional association
If the agent is a member of a scheme, they will normally display its logo on their website.
To complain to a professional association or scheme, you must have been through the member’s own
complaints procedure, and not be satisfied with the result.
You should write to the
relevant association or scheme to explain what your complaint is, enclosing
copies of previous correspondence about the complaint. The association or
scheme will deal with your complaint, provided that:
- you have
reached the end of the agent’s complaints procedure
- you do not
have a court case about your complaint.
If at the end of the
complaints procedure, you are not happy with the result, you may be able to use alternative dispute
resolution (ADR) or go
to court. But if you have agreed an offer or decision about your complaint,
then you cannot take it any further.
